Educational Tutorial Services, with nearly 20 years of experience providing tutoring services to foster youth, seeks crowdfunding support to expand delivery options to youth across the country and globally. Facebook Twitter

Educational Tutorial Services, with nearly 20 years of experience providing tutoring services to foster youth, seeks crowdfunding support to expand delivery options to youth across the country and globally.

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Educational Tutorial Services (E.T.S.) has initiated a RocketHub campaign seeking funding to help launch InstantTutor, the first online tutoring service specifically for students in foster care. Our GoFundMe campaign is raising tutoring scholarship funds for youth in care. With 17 years providing intensive tutoring support to youth in care across the United States, E.T.S. is uniquely qualified to offer this specialized online tutoring experience.

InstantTutor was designed with foster youth in mind. It provides real-time tutoring to students to help bridge learning gaps faster. Students in foster care are more likely than any other group to have significant disruptions in their education. At least one-third of the nearly 500,000 students in care annually in this country will experience five or more different placements and that could mean changing schools as frequently.

In addition to real-time homework help and test preparation assistance, InstantTutor provides multiple language support and is 508 compliant so foster youth with visual impairments can take advantage of online tutoring. All students will have access to a library of free worksheets and will be able to save tutoring sessions for future reference. Tutors and students will use a variety of tools to communicate with each other including desktop sharing, an interactive whiteboard, and live webinars.

The primary goal of E.T.S.'s innovative crowdfunding campaigns is to give all foster youth access to quality tutors who can help them catch up with their peers. "What makes us different, in addition to the student population we are targeting, is the qualifications of our tutors. In addition to being degreed teachers, they are trained to work with foster youth in any tutoring setting. Our online tutoring program also has features not available with other tutoring services. For example, we expect our 'Ask A Question' feature will distinguish us from competitors," says Lisa Russell, CEO of Educational Tutorial Services.

The idea is to make it easy for foster youth to get the help they need. One way to do that is to allow students to ask a single question rather than register for an entire session. With this program, foster youth are no longer waiting for Superman - help is immediately available online from understanding tutors.